Demon Bound

“I’ll make sure you get taken care of,” Jack assured him. Just a little push, just a little tickle of magic to make him sound truthful, to convince the surly bloke that what he wanted—be it ass, cash, or grass—would be waiting for him at the end of the line. Jack was a gifted liar, and gifts that came naturally were easy to turn into magic.

“I’m going down into Tiverton,” the driver grunted. “After that, you’re shite out of luck, friend.”

“Close enough,” Jack said. He climbed aboard and the lorry driver examined him more closely.

“What are you ru

Jack leaned his throbbing forehead against the passenger window as the lorry pulled away.

“Nothing you need to worry about, friend.” He didn’t want to imagine Pete waking up alone, dressing, finding the note. “Nothing at all,” Jack repeated. They left the moor behind, the wild magic with it, and the road smoothed out, taking Jack back to what he supposed was some version of civilization.

Chapter Twenty-one

London bustled and howled and rumbled underfoot like an old friend when Jack got off the train at Paddington. The rustle and caress of the city’s magic felt awkward to Jack’s mind, like a lover you hadn’t seen in weeks, with the perfume of the bird you’d been cheating with still clinging to your collar. After the assault of the ghosts, the primal scream of the moor, the feeling of his and Pete’s magics touching so close and hot they could kindle flame . . .

Jack kicked traitorous thoughts from his head and found a pay phone near the taxi line at the station.

“Yeah, Jack.” Lawrence sounded resigned, like one did when their skint uncle called asking for a loan, again.

“Stop answering the phone like a bloody clairvoyant,” Jack told him. “It’s just showing off, isn’t it?”

“You back already, then?” Lawrence said. “Thought you had a big bad exorcism afoot out there in God’s country.”

“God has a sick fucking sense of humor,” Jack said. “Listen, Lawrence. Cancel your stitch-and-bitch or whatever you have on for today and meet me at Paddington.”

“No. ’M busy, Jack,” Lawrence said. “Got me own life, shocking as I know it be for you to hear.”

“Make it now,” Jack snarled into the phone. “Move your arse. I don’t have a lot of time.”

While he waited for Lawrence, Jack paced back and forth in front of the National Rail boards, and he paced to the ticket machines opposite, and he paced from the Boots to the coffee stand and back, until the transit copper began to look at him like Jack might be contemplating his chances of blowing something up.

Jack sat down and stared at the stains on the floor, islands and peninsulas attesting to the passage of human glaciers. His sight showed him old ghosts, older bodies, flickering in and out of sight as Paddington flowed around him. The Blitz, the bad old days of Thatcher and New Labour, muggings and murders, blood snaking black and gray across the tiles under his feet. Always, the dead came to be with him, just out of sight but never gone.

At length, Lawrence loped up the steps from the tube lines on the lower levels, dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap and his long form encased in a navy coat. He stalked over to Jack and stood, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “All right, man. Here I am. What’s got you so twisted you drag me away from a payin’ client?”

Jack stood up, casting an eye around the crowd out of habit. No one immediately averted their gaze, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. “Not here,” Jack murmured. “Loo.”

“Fuck off,” Lawrence said. “You want them train cops to think we a pair of rent boys?”

“They can think I hail from Suffragette bloody City for all I care,” Jack said, snatching his friend by the arm. “Now come along.”

The men’s loo in Paddington smelled like bleach and was only half lit, fluorescent tubes spitting when Jack passed under them. He locked the door to the outside and faced Lawrence. “I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen and not give me any of your usually gra

Lawrence blinked at him. “What happened since I saw you last, Jack? This shifty business ain’t like you.”

Jack ignored the question, casting about in his leather for a key to his flat. He pressed it into Lawrence’s hand. “My grimoire is on the mantle in the sitting room. Everything I bothered to write down, every spell, every spirit, it’s there.” His pulse pounded, feverish against his temples, and the lights flickered again, casting Lawrence into shadow for a split second. “I have about fifty pounds in a sock in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. You should give that to Pete. Haven’t anything else, except the flat, and I suppose you and she can decide what to do with that.”

Lawrence held up his hands. “Jack. I know you think the devil’s bargain be pulling you down into the Pit, but it ain’t sure yet. You’re scarin’ me, true.”

“It could be. You know that, too.” Jack fixed Lawrence with a stare that he hoped was penetrating enough to prick his friend’s denial that Jack Winter was fucked, indeed. “Lawrence, if I don’t see you again, I trust you to do what needs to be done. It’s that bloody simple.”

When mages kicked off, there were rules. Rituals, and incantations. A thousand small assurances that your dearly departed friend would not become a plaything of the creatures in the thin spaces, things that were neither Fae or ghost. The mourners of a mage ushered the spirit through the Bleak Gates, locked it up tight where it could never trouble the living.

So if Jack didn’t return, and he admitted it was wholly possible, Lawrence would burn his grimoire, dispose of his assets, and take his body—if there was one—to its final rest, in the tradition of the crow.

Lawrence started shaking his head immediately when Jack stopped speaking, his eyes panicked. “Won’t do it, Jack. You ain’t going through with whatever foolishness you think you up to . . .”

“It’s not foolishness,” Jack snarled, perhaps more harshly than he needed to. His voice echoed off the tile of the loo. “And you’re the only person I fucking trust to do right by me if it is, so shut your gob, take the key, and say you’ll look after Pete if I don’t come back.”

Lawrence screwed up his face, but he tucked the key into his coat pocket. “I don’t like this, Jack. You still thinking you can beat that demon, aren’t you? Still thinking you the wickedest man in the world.”

Jack faced his gaze to Lawrence, staring a hole in the other man until Lawrence squirmed. “I’m fucking rubbish at a lot of it,” Jack said quietly, “but I am the crow-mage and it wouldn’t kill you to have a little fucking faith, Lawrence.”

Lawrence dropped his eyes, giving the small victory to Jack. “I save me faith for the devils and the saints, man.”

Jack felt his fists curl. An ego was something a man of his age and situation could ill afford, but there was still a bit of the flame left in his chest, enough to burn small holes in other people’s good intentions. “You want to say different? Want us to have a little mage’s duel right here in the loo?” Jack set his feet. Lawrence had height and weight on him, but he was a white witch with white witch charms and spells in his arsenal, and Jack wagered he could knock Lawrence on his arse before the magic ever started flying.

“I don’t want to fight wit’ you, Jack,” Lawrence sighed. “I want me best friend in the world not to be dragged into Hell. But me a day late and a pound short on that score.”

“Too right,” Jack said. He left off his planted feet and solid fists, and went to unlock the door and leave. Lawrence could piss and moan the hind legs off of a horse, but he’d do what Jack asked. He always had, from the first day they’d met, in a squat straddling the edges of the Black and a horrid dump in Peckham. Lawrence was a deejay from Birmingham. Jack was a ski